Transcendental Nature: An Anthology of 19th Century American Writing on the Divine in the Natural World
Edited by Walt McLaughlin
Wood Thrush Books, 2024
136 pages, paperback
ISBN 979-8-9881716-3-8
These prose fragments, journal entries and poems trace the idea of the divine in nature from thinkers in the 1830s to the emergence of uniquely American nature writing. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau loom large here, fusing the spiritual and natural realms. Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and half a dozen other Transcendentalists accompany them. Selections from the work of Walt Whitman, John Muir and John Burroughs show how this deep reverence for nature spread during the latter half of the 19th century. Together these writers and thinkers have laid the foundation for a naturalistic worldview that is much needed today.